ANWAR QADIR
It was reading, writing, arithmetic and racism, right, these had to be the four Rs in education, and once you get the racism bit in there as well, once you start teaching history as history is or was, right, i.e. factual, right, rather than make belief and value orientated, right, and oppressive and discriminative, unless you do that you’re always going to have a situation where communities are going to sort of say well we want our own schools.
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JANI RASHID
It was in 1983 that the Council developed multi-cultural policies, some of which was based on the, the recommendations that we had made, in our article. These were issues about, sort of, acknowledging people’s religious requirements, so they had to address religious issues, they had to address linguistic issues, they had to, sort of, have a better understanding of the modes of dress, for example, of children from different religious backgrounds, so, that, that was one of the things that we said that was important, but we never asked
for multi-cultural education, and, and I’d have to say that I still don’t believe in multi-cultural education. You know, what we were demanding was anti-racist education, in actual fact, but I don’t think that the authorities were very comfortable with that, so they developed multi-cultural policies to address issues of racism in schools that we were complaining about, which we felt were more important than having segregated schools